Domestic Disasters: A visual conversation with Patty Carroll
A woman in pink fifties cigarette pants disappears into her oven, her legs, finished with pink pumps dangle before the viewer. Pink sleeves with her hands in them stick up through the burners, clashing with but also echoing the rosy walls of her kitchen. Stainless steel pans are stacked everywhere in piles caught at the moment before collapse, before disaster.
The rich patterns of the curtains—we seem to be looking through a window on this calamitous scene—talk loudly to other patterns in many shades of pink, from salmon to candy to rose: the flowered apron caught in and spilling out of a cabinet drawer; the piece of children’s art on the fridge, also with a floral motif that embellished the word “Mom”; another piece of art with cutout pink and white hearts framed by the refrigerator door. In the foreground, a pink rolling pin cuts diagonally across the floor, seeming to point at both a pink meatgrinder and to the exit, stage right. If our eyes return however, as they must, to the central figure, there is no escape.
More than most other images in Patty Carroll’s photographic series “Anonymous Women: Domestic Demise,” this feels like a still from a movie or a narrative painting. The pictured scene freezes on the edge of disaster: the pots are about to topple, the rolling pin about the roll, the woman perhaps about to kill herself. Carroll explains that the archetypal woman in this series “becomes the victim of domestic disasters. Her activities, obsessions and objects are overwhelming her. Her home has become a site of tragedy. The scenes of her heartbreaking end are loosely inspired by several sources including the game of Clue, where murder occurs in one of five rooms of the house: Dining Room, Kitchen, Hall, Conservatory, and Library.”
Home, in the “Demise” photographs becomes a site of death and danger. In an earlier series, “Anonymous Women: Draped,” danger and power seem to be more complexly linked. The women of “Draped” become invisible, engulfed by their curtains their clothing, and their upholstery. Even more explicitly perhaps than “Demise,” “Draped “is all about the material world of the domestic, as viewers are presented with images in which they search for the outline of a female face or body under the visual weight of domestic fabrics. The invisibility of these women is complicated: they are erased but also protected by the accoutrements of domestic life. As Carroll put is, “The home is a place of comfort but can also be camouflage for individual identity when idealized decor becomes an obsession, or indication of position or status. “Staying home” is a state that some women also aspire to as a place of power, while others abhor because of its prison-like atmosphere.”
My intention for this post was to write about—perhaps stage a conversation with-- Carroll, whose work I have found particularly relevant during the pandemic with its paradoxical relation to home and homing. I would present her photographs and respond in writing. Two things intervened in that plan, the first, ironically, having to do with finding myself once again trapped at home. I had to give up a longstanding plan to visit an exabit of “Demise” in Dallas, about a four-hour drive away, when Houston’s apparently now annual ice storm hit last week. As perhaps the worst snow and ice driver who ever spent time significant time in New England, I decided to forgo the trip, which represented my last chance to visit the exhibit in person before it closed. My conversation depended, in my mind, on having seen the collection as a collection, and having encountered the images I had seen online in person (books and catalogues featuring Carroll’s work are either sold out or staggeringly expensive). The second limitation of this post has to do with copyright: I did not want to reproduce Carroll’s photographs without permission—thus the links to her websites, above. While the slow process of publishing a scholarly piece would have given me time to acquire permissions, a blog doesn’t work that way. The piece I imagined—a call and response of her images and my observations would have, at least in my opinion, violated Carroll’s control over her work.
The impediments to this imaginary encounter made me turn inward to a very uncomfortable if uncomfortably familiar place: my own house. As the existence of this blog suggests, I do return regularly to the topic of my literal home. As I thought about Carroll’s work, however, I decided to take on what is for me another level of discomfort—the photograph. Partly to avoid copyright issues, and partly because they feel right, I have often illustrated this blog with cell phone pictures of my home, some taken specifically for the blog, and some selected from my burgeoning album of images across my various devices. While trying to retain some degree of privacy and protection, I have included a glimpse of my front door, close-ups of my china and linens—and probably too many pictures of my dogs. I have never shown a photograph of myself, put myself in the picture. Mostly, I hate and resist being photographed, and would almost always prefer to be invisible to the camera. There are, however, exceptions to my resistance—and we are back to the dogs again. I do not mind and even encourage my sons taking photographs of me with the dogs; most of the resulting images—and there are endless iterations of them—are taken of me sitting on the couch with one or more dogs sitting by me, festooning around me, perched behind me on the back of the couch so it looks as if one or another of them is sitting on my head. About a year ago, it was a project to get a “four-dog” picture; now this comes relatively easil as they willingly arrange themselves for the camera.
Left to right: Sydney, Zuko, Djinn, Helena, Kendrick
The couch-and-dog photos, as I click through them, are in many ways amateurish, “homemade” versions of the photographs in “Draped.” I am very much present, looking, as I tend to, older, paler, and stranger than I would like, but I am also almost swallowed, in this persistent genre of dog-and-couch, by fur and fabric, doodle and throw. Since the rest of my family likes the house colder than I do, especially in the summer, I almost never sit to read or watch tv without a quilt of some kind—and I asked for, and received, more of them for Christmas. So, there I am, more times than I thought, at the approximate center of a swirl of textures: Sydney’s apricot curls, Zuko’s chenille-like black knots; Kendrick’s sleek waterproof coat; Djinn’s sturdy patterned tufts in black, grey, and white. And that is just the fur— I can also see , in many if the pictures, wool, cotton, polyester, rayon and the baseline leather of the couch rubbed rough by dogs, cats, and humans.
Am I, like the anonymous women of “Draped,” rendered invisible by my household gods? Is the merging of flesh, fur, and fabric a sign of power? Comfort? Disaster? As the maroon hooked throw my husband worked so hard to match to my mother’s Chinese rug slips across my body to the floor, is the image capturing this movement empowering or otherwise? Where am I in the picture, both as the central, vertical body and as the orchestrator of the four-dog shot? Am I hiding behind my dogs, my house, my blankets, or am I taking control of the picture and the frame? What might a formal “draped” photograph of this scene look like? Would one or more the blankets cover my face? Would one or more dogs be posed so I could no longer be seen? What if the photograph were not part of “draped” but of “Domestic Demise?” What disaster is recorded in the fact of my sitting, every day during the pandemic on the same spot on the same couch bought too quickly to furnish a post-Harvey home?
I cannot avoid thinking of Carroll’s analysis—that the home and the objects in it can act as a kind of camouflage: protection, yes, but also something very much like erasure. I think of my preoccupation with fabrics—bedsheets, quilts, napkins, table runners, LINK to LINENS AND THINGS and wonder why I am so much more invested in them than I am in clothing, why, when hosting a dinner party, I put almost no thought into what I will wear to sit around the table I spent so much time “dressing.” I think of how I use the dogs for protection—not literally, since I suspect they would not be very good guard dogs, but as conversation starters, permission to relax, ways of ordering my day. The photograph I have chosen among so many similar ones shows a layered series of defenses—pets, blankets, iPad—but against what? The outside world? The house itself? Being seen or embodied? In speaking only of defenses, I am avoiding of course the resonant language of domestic pleasure. I see camouflage but I also see and feel “coziness,” “cuddling,” “comfort”—even the loved and hated “cottagecore.” The photographs, for all their foregrounding of texture cannot replicate the feel of different furs, or the brush of a feathery tail. They cannot replicate the perfect weight of the perfectly middle-sized dog against my body or do more than suggest the heft of middle-weight blankets chosen for me with so much love and care.